Andrew O'Hara
On this episode of the HomeKit Insider Podcast Apple's 2025 smart home plans become more clear and more new products launch.
We saw two pieces of smart lock news this week. Nuki released the Nuki Lock Ultra in the EU — before a 2025 US release — that was massively updated.
The Nuki Lock Ultra is three times smaller and three times as fast as its predecessor. There's no Home Key support but they do plan to support Aliro, which is essentially the same.
Level then updated its Level Lock+ to Matter via a free firmware update. What's important here is that not only does it unlock Matter, but Thread support too.
Aqara is teasing its newest product too, which appears to be a smart water controller. Its social media promises a release date of November 19.
The rest of the episode was spent on Apple's new smart home plans. More details have emerged ahead of the first release in early 2025.
Apple's smart home display will purportedly be roughly six inches in size and have multiple mounting options, including a stand or on the wall. It will run a new homeOS and have a built-in FaceTime camera.
After that, it seems Apple is looking at creating its own smart home security camera. This will drop in 2026 and focus on privacy and Apple Intelligence to differentiate itself.
Links from the HomeKit Insider podcast
- Queue - Simple Podcasts
- Nuki smart lock ultra
- Apple developing security camera
- Apple's smart display controller
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William Gallagher
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
Mike Wuerthele
Christine McKee
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1 Comment
I listened to your discussion about the potential Apple home hub device, and it seemed like you circled all the way around it and almost might've landed on what it will be when you mentioned interaction with HomePods, but then didn't quite get there.
I think what it will be is a hub device that could conceivably look like an AppleTV box that ships with one or maybe two wireless dummy terminal screens, and the option to buy more screens if you need them. This is how you'd achieve what both of you in the podcast were identifying as priorities for such a device. The hub needs to have the processing hardware to be able to handle Apple Intelligence on-device. The hook is, since it's a home hub and will always stay in your home, you don't need more than one device with that processing power. So the hub part is a single computing device for the whole home. Then you can have however many inexpensive, comparatively underpowered dumb terminal control screens as you need. Those would sit in stands or wall holders around the house, keeping their batteries fully charged, but they could be picked up and placed on another stand as needed to do FaceTime calls or display a recipe in the kitchen or whatever. Those screens plus any HomePods you have (even the OG HomePods you still have!) would all then be fully enabled for secure Apple Intelligence, because the computationally intensive AI queries submitted via any screen or HomePod on the home network would be run in-house on the single hub device.
This is how they can achieve a low overall price point while also making Apple Intelligence and HomeKit control available on screens and speakers throughout the house.